Jury-Law books

There,
access to the terminals was doled out according to
academic rank. As an undergrad, Stallman usually had to
sign up or wait until midnight, about the time most
professors and grad students finished their daily work
assignments. The waiting wasn't difficult, but it was
frustrating. Waiting for a public terminal, knowing all
the while that a half dozen equally usable machines
were sitting idle inside professors' locked offices,
seemed the height of illogic. Although Stallman paid
the occasional visit to the Harvard computer labs, he
preferred the more egalitarian policies of the AI Lab.
"It was a breath of fresh air," he says. "At the AI
Lab, people seemed more concerned about work than status."
Stallman quickly learned that the AI Lab's first-come,
first-served policy owed much to the efforts of a
vigilant few. Many were holdovers from the days of
Project MAC, the Department of Defense-funded research
program that had given birth to the first time-share
operating systems. A few were already legends in the
computing world.


Pages:
83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107